[eschaton]

Originally Posted by Handro

I've never been but I've always assumed Columbus had some urbanity simply based on size... can anyone confirm or deny?

Columbus is better than the Indianapolis clone some people project it as being.

German Village is a legitimately great, finely-scaled, old urban neighborhood. The brick cottage vernacular is unlike anything else I've ever seen in the United States. Most of the streets and sidewalks are paved with brick or stone. The only real flaw is it lacks a well-defined business district, but scattered storefronts are peppered throughout, making it plenty walkable.

Columbus's greater downtown area is underwhelming given the level of new investment in the metro area overall. There's still lots of blocks dominated by parking and low-slung commercial buildings on its fringes.

The real densification of Columbus is taking place north of Downtown, along N High Street all the way to University District. This is a pretty impressive corridor. However, it's less than three miles long, and still has some big gaps. There's some nice historic residential neighborhoods on either side of it, but they're more or less built at streetcar suburban densities.

Outside of these areas, there's not really all that much, and it is rather akin to Indianapolis.

Originally Posted by mrnyc

cleveland had all that, but it too was chopped up by abandonment, teardowns and urban prairie.

younger people forget when it looked like when it was much more intact/connected than the neighborhood nodes visitors have to figure out today.

I don't think, even at its height, Cleveland was ever built as well or as urban as somewhere like Cinci or St. Louis. Great Lakes cities just tended towards a less intense vernacular (detached wood-framed structures set back from the street more) and Cleveland, like a lot of Great Lakes cities, eschewed the long linear commercial strips in favor of shorter ones and random stores plopped on street corners.

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

Milwaukee east of the Milwaukee river is quite urban.

In places, yes. But similar to Minneapolis there's this weird disconnect in terms of the historic form. Basically Milwaukee either built brick apartment buildings or detached-wood frame houses (or two units which looked identical to detached wood-frame houses) meaning you don't get that nice intermediate density level in terms of urbanity you get in areas which have rowhouses or two/three flats which front right on the sidewalk.

I'd also note that Milwaukee's overall density is helped tremendously by the Latino neighborhoods in South Milwaukee, which are not really all that urban in terms of built vernacular at all.